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Saleh and opposition parties agree on interim lineup

Outgoing Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and the country's opposition parties reached an agreement Thursday to divide up key positions in the new interim government. A national election is due to take place early next year.

REUTERS - Yemen’s opposition said it agreed the lineup of an interim government on Thursday with outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s party, under a deal to end a struggle over his fate that has brought the country close to civil war.

However, progress on the deal crafted by Yemen’s Gulf Arab neighbours showed no signs of ending the bloodshed that has stained 10 months of protests against Saleh, with at least 10 civilians and government troops dying in the country’s commercial capital, a hotbed of anti-Saleh demonstrations.

The plan’s sponsors hope it can reverse a slide toward chaos on the doorstep of the world’s biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, and prevent al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch from gaining a foothold near shipping routes through the Red Sea.

An official of the Joint Meeting Parties, a bloc of opposition parties that signed the power transfer plan in Riyadh, said they had settled on a division of cabinet seats between themselves and Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC).

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Saleh’s party would take portfolios including defence, foreign affairs and oil, while the opposition would get the interior, finance and education ministries.

The prospective government would lead the country to a presidential election that Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the vice president to whom Saleh has transferred his powers, has set for Feb. 21, 2012.

Opposition sources also said they had given Hadi a list of their choices for a military council tasked with running the army until a new president is elected. The list included former defence and interior ministers, and army commanders who turned on Saleh.

Under the Gulf initiative signed by Saleh, a body will be set up to restructure the armed forces. Saleh’s son Ahmed commands the Republican Guard, one of the best equipped units.

A completed transfer of power would make Saleh the fourth Arab leader to be toppled following mass protests that have reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East.

Southern Protest Centre

In Taiz, about 200 km (120 miles) south of the capital Sanaa, at least 10 civilians and soldiers were killed, medical workers and security sources said.

Five civilians died in what residents said was shelling by government forces overnight in Taiz, a centre of protests ringed by troops loyal to Saleh as well as tribal forces and troops who back the protesters.

“We are living in an atmosphere of real war. We couldn’t sleep from the intensity of the blasts. We came to the aid of five residents of the quarter whose house a shell landed on,” resident Abdullah al-Sharaabi told Reuters by telephone.

A security official dismissed the reports of the shelling of residential areas as lies and said “armed elements” had attacked several security checkpoints in the city.

Staff at al-Rawdah hospital said five civilians had been killed and several injured. A field hospital in Taiz also received 10 injured civilians.

“Saleh’s forces, which are concentrated in various parts of the city, fired shells on al-Manakh and al-Hasab and Bir Basha districts and the shelling continued until the early hours of Thursday morning,” said lawyer Tawfeeq al-Shaabi, an activist in the protest movement.

Protesters in Taiz and elsewhere have denounced the immunity from prosecution Saleh and relatives would enjoy under the power transfer deal.

Human Rights Watch said last week that up to 35 civilians had been killed in Taiz since a U.N. Security Council resolution in October that backed the call for a power transfer and condemned the crackdown on protesters.

The group said most of those civilians were killed by artillery fire from Yemeni government forces, and called on the U.N. Security Council to freeze the assets of top Yemeni officials and distance itself from any promises of immunity.